the only control I possess means sorting and re-sorting the past, those multicolored leaves meant

to decorate the various trails through history.

How does one construct an argument

uttered so precisely it will propound

the annals of correct acts by human beings?

This remains my obsession, perhaps my undoing,

as women like me can be easily unraveled

by the pheromone desire to survive into other centuries.

So if words can be slingshotted like tiny satellites

far into the future, carrying some cryptic pictogram

of the true intentions of the human race—

all our millions of desires simplified into a few

respectable drawings on newly discovered metal

alloys – if words can truly do this for me,

than it’s worth any effort

to elegantly pick through all these pages

and try to place some distinct order

on how I want to be remembered

in the teeming with all the other aspirants.

I suspect my ledger still balances favorably,

regardless of my current understanding.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was an American poet known for her unadulterated chronicling of intimate and socially taboo subjects. She won the Pulitzer in 1967 for “Love or Die,” and gave her answer to that title in 1974 with her death by her own hand. She once wrote of frequent drinking dates at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath: “Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at length, in detail, and in depth between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of a poem.”

Anne Sexton Quotes:

Live or die, But don’t poison everything.

Well, one gets out of bed and the planets dont always hiss or muck up the day, each day.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.

It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take that away.

Book of the Dead

These poems do not go, you know,
through the spaces they were meant,
do not flow into the looks askance
or foliate into proper poundings . . .

they do not, do not do so, you know,
but all the while they mark and notate, notch
and draw, hoping to catch the notice of a god
while my soul can scurry unobserved to

somewhere I cannot seem to imagine.

Poet Ward Kelley’s Notes: The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a compilation of various charms and incantations meant to convince or trick the gods into allowing the soul to enter paradise. Follow Ward Kelley at Medium.com

S. Eliot (1888-1965) was arguably the most influential poet of the 20th century. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot was educated at Harvard, but then moved to England where he became a British citizen in 1927. Best known for his poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and “The Waste Land,” Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. According to Eliot’s instructions, his tomb was engraved with the phrase, “in the beginning is my end, in the end is my beginning.” The title of the above poem was taken from the dedication to his poem “Gerontion.”

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was an American poet known for her unadulterated chronicling of intimate and socially taboo subjects. She won the Pulitzer in 1967 for “Love or Die,” and gave her answer to that title in 1974 with her death by her own hand. She once wrote of frequent drinking dates at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath: “Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at length, in detail, and in depth between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of a poem.”

The Ancient Heart of Sandy

My photographs always appeared too sweet,
and I never managed to reflect accurate songs
from my ancient heart out through my two
sugary eyes. Even my girlish cheeks betrayed
an affection for the comforts of modern England.

But never was I betrayed by my heart, never by
that olden beast, for it was there that screams
and trials pumped, peasant wearies and crusades
jumped fiery words forth from quilled pens . . .
it was there that pulsed the great desire

of the race to rise somehow from this mud
of the breathing ones, after falling
and falling again and again back
into our slippery selves, yet always,
incessantly, finding a cause to rise.

Nay, nay, nay . . . yea, nay, nay,
this is our way to find ourselves along
in the midst of the great muddy battle
of what it means to be alone in the breathing,
and this was the way of my aged heart’s song.

Sandy Denny (1947-1978), English folk singer, died tragically at a young age when she fell down the steps at a friend’s home and went immediately into a coma. She passed away four days later. One of the many songs she penned was an instrumental she co-authored, “The Lord Is In This Place, How Dreadful Is This Place.”

Listen to Music by Joan in the Fires

PlayWild Mouse

PlayFolds

PlaySylvia Raises a Slender, White Hand

PlayVariations on Emily

PlayPrimal Peals of Learning

PlayJoan in the Fires

PlaySong For the Morning

PlayMake Me a Home

PlayThis Love

PlayCicero Thrusts His Head

PlayCenturion Hesitates At the Lake

PlayFor You

PlaySecret of Life

PlayEverywhere I’ve Been

PlayBonus – Song For the Morning, acoustic

Joan in the Fires

Folk Singer

Jessie Doyle is a Virginia singer/songwriter of folk, folk rock, and roots music, currently living in central Virginia. She released many of her own compositions, and fronts the Americana group, Folk Medicine. She recently launched a collaboration with writer/poet Ward Kelley, which can be found at Joan in the Fires.

Jessie is the consummate free spirit, whether in her music, choice of favored instruments (uke & banjo) or living style – she spent four years at the Virginia commune, Twin Oaks International Community, saying, ”It was a great four years in which I felt like I could really be myself. My time spent there is irreplaceable.” … READ MORE

My heart floats in the ibis jar on top
my brains and liver, all my organs mixed
together like a fetal mass . . . and so I am back
at the womb, a time when my interior ingredients
floated indistinguishable from my exterior.

When I gain another chance at breathing,
I think I will create a creature
whose interior thoughts are more visible
to its fellows, for I now understand
most strife between us breathing ones
comes from misread intentions.

Animals act more precise in their
communications; their bodies change colors,
emit noises and odors, and no misunderstanding
of power occurs. They rarely kill one of their own.

Human expressions failed to keep up
with the evolution of our complicated thoughts,
and skin feels too dumb to sustain much more
than pleasure or pain, while the nuances our flesh
emits seldom fathoms and never completes
until we all rest in ibis jars and wish
for more succinct creatures.

Author’s Ramose Notes:

Ramose (circa 1350 BCE), was vizier to Pharoahs Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaton. He was buried at Thebes, however the tomb that appears to have built for him shows no evidence of his use of it. Still the tomb is famous for its reliefs, such as female mourners and a tekenu. A current theory espouses the nature of a tekenu as a shroud containing spare body parts left over from the mummification process.

What is a Vizier?

The vizier was the highest official in Ancient Egypt to serve the king or pharaoh.

The Ancient Egyptian noble, Ramose was Vizier under both Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. He was in office in the last decade of Amenhotep’s III reign and at the beginning of the reign of the latter king. Ramose appears on jar labels found in the palace of king Amenhotep III atMalkata. Here appears also the vizier Amenhotep-Huy. Both viziers are also shown side by side in the temple of Soleb. In the New Kingdom the office of the vizier was divided in a northern vizier and a southern one. It is not entirely clear whether Ramose was the southern or northern one.[1]

Ramose was born into an influential family. His father was the mayor of Memphis Heby, in office at the beginning of Amenhotep’s III reign. The brother of Ramose was the high stewardof Memphis Amenhotep (Huy).[2]

Pictures is a Depiction of Ramose in his tomb with photo by David Schmid.

I cannot compel myself
to make reason of her.
Why does she squander
so many hours of each
finite day, so many hours spent
ministering to dead persons?
She prays most of the day
to people who died,
saints of this odd sect . . .

She must bestow this time
on me, give me this ardent
attention. For I can surely
fulfill the role of saint; I can
give her answers to any
question she might ask
about living and dying.
Certainly an emperor
knows more about these
shades of man and woman
than a dead person, and I
could make her body
feel much more riveted
than any stirrings
of prayer might provide.

Yet . . . I fear her stubbornness
whispers to me how all our own gods
are now dead—our gods who lived

forever and received our own most
piercing, but misplaced, desires to live
forever with them . . . our gods!

So now, do all gods, once so omnipotent,
fall dead somewhere in the progress of time?

Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Authors Notes about The Emperor Decides to Kill Catherine
Catherine of Alexandria, (circa 213), was a Roman Catholic saint, whose beauty so impressed the Roman Emperor Maximian that he offered to overlook her refusal to sacrifice to the gods if she would only submit to his desires. Catherine rejected his overtures, saying she was already the bride of Christ, and even converted the fifty philosophers Maximian convened to change her mind. The emperor beheaded the philosophers, then attempted to have Catherine broken on a spiked wheel, however it miraculously shattered. Instead Maximian had her beheaded, yet when he did, milk flowed from her severed neck. Where this tale was highly popular in the medieval West, most historians think it is probable Catherine never existed. Joan of Arc, though, did not concur with such skeptics; Catherine was one of the three saints Joan claimed appeared to her to offer advice in her military endeavors.

According to the traditional narrative, Catherine was the daughter of Constus, the governor of Alexandrian Egypt during the reign of the emperor Maximian (286 – 305). From a young age she had devoted herself to study. A vision of the Madonna and Child persuaded her to become a Christian. When the persecutions began under Maxentius, she went to the emperor and rebuked him for his cruelty. The emperor summoned fifty of the best pagan philosophers and orators to dispute with her, hoping that they would refute her pro-Christian arguments, but Catherine won the debate. Several of her adversaries, conquered by her eloquence, declared themselves Christians and were at once put to death.

Part one is called “Souls Alive” and contains poetry about famous people and/or events. There are poems about Joan of Arc, Sylvia Plath, Xerxes I ( a king of Persia), Akhenaton (a pharaoh of Egypt and husband of Nefertiti), Sandra Jones, Daniel DeFoe, Leo Tolstoy, and more…

Part two “Souls in Love”, Part three “Dead Souls”, and Part 4 “Reverse Prayer”, along with a special bonus chapter of lyrics inspired by history of souls by Ward Kelley and Don Whitaker album Gnarled Bones. Ward Kelley’s music business has grown into Wardco Studios, and the music uses many these poems as inspirations for lyrics and the music written for those lyrics. Listen free at WardKelleyArtists.com

Ward Kelley has seen his stories and poems appear in hundreds of journals worldwide. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His full biography, awards, and publications. Follow Ward Kelley’s Amazon Author’s page, which includes his blog posts.

In this broadcast of Wardco Studios Showcase, we are featuring Indie Music by Indie Artists Jeff Stafford and the Short Bus Criminals, Verity White and Dave Vargo. Learn more about these Indie Artists at WardcoStudios.com and get links to the artists’ websites and social media. Indie Artists are welcome to submit music to our podcast. […]

In this broadcast of Wardco Studios Showcase, we are featuring Indie Music by Indie Artists Jeff Stafford and the Short Bus Criminals, Verity White and Dave Vargo. Learn more about these Indie Artists at WardcoStudios.com and get links to the artists’ websites and social media. Indie Artists are welcome to submit music to our podcast. […]

In this broadcast of Wardco Studios Showcase, we are featuring Indie Music by Indie Artists Lonesome Train, Tracy Colletto, and Francesco Zane. Learn more about these Indie Artists at WardcoStudios.com and get links to the artists’ websites and social media. Indie Artists are welcome to submit music to our podcast. Comment on the Podcast using […]